Daniel Kador – Keen IO

Hey, I’m Chris. I wrote this article and I’m also the founder and Editor of DailyTekk. Lets connect on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. Check back daily!

Daniel Kador is the co-founder of Keen IO, the API for custom analytics.

LEAD

Leadership is communicating company vision and then getting out of the way. The best way to lead the best people is to trust that they’ll do the right thing given accurate inputs.

OPERATE

We’ve added a lot of engineering focus to monitoring. We’ve always been good at business-level analytics (users, revenue, etc.) and product-level analytics (number of API calls), but we haven’t been as good at component-level analytics (how are Storm, Cassandra, Nginx, etc. doing?). We’ve made a ton of improvements here.

TEAM

Like above, it’s all about communicating vision. We tell people the truth about our company: we want to create a large, sustainable business solving really interesting problems while innovating on company and organizational structure.

PRODUCE

We have lots of little things like meeting rules, no policies about working from home or PTO, etc. I’d say the more important things are around culture designed to create *sustainable* productivity. We don’t want folks working 80-90 hours a week. We want people working 40-50 and going home to do other things.

START

Our very first user came from the TechStars network. A local development shop agreed to give us a shot and had us integrated into their app within a morning. On the paying customer front, we had a number of friends at various startups who knew what we were working on and were very excited when we launched to them.

ADVICE

How much of an emotional roller coaster it is. We were warned that it was hard, and of course we academically knew that… but that still didn’t prepare us to deal with the *very* high moments and the *incredibly* low moments (often on the same day!).